Me and the 12

So, the time has come to present to the world a few of my inner friends - they came to me in a very special autumn a few years back. They all represent the fact that my own being is not a completely cohesive entity worthy of the name I carry in the world. Rather, I'm a bundle of processes, streams of wills and patterns whirling around in my personal mind and the fact that I feel as a single person is either an illusion or something of a miracle, a creation orchestrated from the divine realms of existence. This group of twelve I consider as governors of these mentioned processes. The processes themselves are likely all too numerable to be counted and categorized properly, but the twelve is distinct enough to me to be able to roughly take care of them all. 

It's important to note that I, Simon Jester, isn't these beings. To believe such would be a symptom of desillusion disorder and even if this alchemic image below likely is inspired from my study of that disorder, the twelve is still something entirely different than a fader version of what is going on in the mind of the DID- patient. Instead I see the twelve as different departments of my own mind. It's real in the sense that they came about due to a frustration of that I simultaneously can want opposite things in life and that I even am able to react in conflicting ways when facing certain situations. My person is not one, it act as if it would be, but my personal being is rather something of a tiny hive mind, synchronizing as of out of habit most of the time - or perhaps convenience due to the terms of this realm. I'm not really sure. How is oneness ever achieved? 

If anyone wonders of my conceived realness of these beings below I once again wish to refer to Kastrup and his concept of mythological ambiguity. I don't know. On one hand I'm quite sure that these beings are a conscious, fictitious creation of me to visualize certain ideas to myself, on the other hand the twelve can feel real enough for me at times that I wish to remain uncertain. If they are real I'm sure I've misunderstood one or two things about the constitution of their being but it should be in essence correct. Maybe they have their own realm somewhere in the depths of the psyche, it's simply impossible to know. 

Ah. Let the introductions begin. 

Oscar Octobre and August May

The twelve comes in six pairs and the first couple represent my corporal mind. Oscar is the dark one and August the light. I'm mostly defined by Oscar who also borrows hist surname from one of the Djinns that I previously have talked about. Oscar is defined by my physical disability and even if Simon Jester tries to diminish the affects this disability has in my life, Oscar cannot. He always notices the poor consequences of living with it and he loathes it with the same power I had as a child. Oscar hates the world, he hates being forced to be locked into a corporal realm constituted by ruthless competition and where he has no choice but to deal with a short stacked hand. His rage and sorrow is always flowing shortly under the surface within me, but as Simon Jester I don't have much choice than to resign to the fact that it is futile to let it rise above it, it doesn't yield anything worthwhile and almost never has. 

August is the being however that thoroughly enjoy life as it is, he notices how many treasures of pleasure and joy there is even in this realm and he doesn't ever cut short of opportunities to praise and enjoy them. He doesn't enjoy everything life has to offer, he's not a masochist, but the things he do enjoy he does with a passion. Existence is a smorgasbord of pleasures to him and he won't accept the notion that he somewhere should be ashamed because of this. For August Hedonism isn't only the way, but the very reason existence has been created. Naturally, I'm inclined to like August but as Simon Jester he is actually most of a hassle since life and existence isn't structured for maximizing the pleasures of my own person. August needs to be regulated and kept in check and at certain times that challenge is rather overwhelming. I wish existence was as August claims it is, but alas, it's not where we are. 

Pål Ekman and Anton Halldorf  

The next pair represent my Christianity, the most significant gift of my parents to me. I often state that I truly have no choice than being a christian and this is because its views, values and pattern of being has been planted within me from the get go. I have the stories of the Bible within my back bone, they are a part of my earliest memories and combining that to all the memories of different services, masses and general communions with the christians from my youth and I can surely say I have no idea what life and existence is in this realm without the christian overlay. This is indeed a double-edged  sword in many ways, carrying both blessings and curses but it is nevertheless a fact. I as Simon Jester can strive to create other identities for myself outside of what the christian parameters would allow but these two absolutely just screams in agony any time such a process is implemented. 

However, the two are quite different from one another. Pål represents the Christianity of my childhood and youth and Anton "was installed into being" at my time at Bjärka-Säby, representing my adult form of Christianity - more based in my own sense of rationality and spiritual preferences where Pål just carries the pattern given to him without much of a choice from me personally. 

Påls Christianity is rooted in a baptist evangelical tradition, charismatic and thoroughly literal when it comes to relating to the Bible. In a certain sense this is rather beautiful, the Christian world view created by scripture and (protestant mainly) tradition is rather appealing in many ways. You have a benevolent God maintaining a gorgeous garden of sorts for his created children where we learn through our Master in Christ to be more and more divine, yes through Christ we have gotten a key to creation which will eventually unlock everything but we can try and see the truth of all this already here and now. Of course. All this would be appealing if it wouldn't be for the pesky aspects of sin, death and the constant rebellion against God taking place in the "garden of Earth" which is more of a reckless wilderness than the alluded garden so to speak. The drama of the literalist world view has such high stakes too. God has put his created children into a drastic gamble where we must find ourselves doing the right choice of becoming believers to stand a chance to not only be allowed in into heaven but avoid an eternity in Hell. 

This drama when received literally puts a bundle of anguish into the hearts of its hearers. I myself has never been too worried of my own salvation but gosh, have I ever ruminated of the fate of all the non-believers out there. The urge to save them, by all means necessary, is something very deep in how Pål sees the world. There is a kicker though. The manual to do this, found mainly in Acts but also in the NT in general seems to suggest that christians, at least those that believe, should have a bunch of superpowers in place. Our prayer should be able to move mountains, heal the sick and bring God's presence visible to our surroundings. As Pål I deeply believed this, with all my might and the result was frankly nothing. I can't be sure of a single miracle during the years I was a charismatic, not a single one, there were divinely kissed experiences for sure but as I could see later there was nothing that tied those experiences exclusively to a literalist christian understanding of the world. They were simply spiritual experiences, but in no need of a label on its own. 
 
For Pål this has been completely crushing, especially the fact that ten thousand prayers and more regarding my physical state hasn't moved God at all has left him in a state of absolute agony. Yet he can't go. He loves the images he received before he even was anything all too much, Pål is Christian in this fashion before he was a person in any other regard and only the thought of abandoning his Christian identity terrorizes him out of his mind. He has learnt to tolerate Anton though, and even if he still reacts negatively to Antons way of reading scripture he can see that it helps with the anguish and terror his literal Christianity has cast him with. 

*

Anton was as said born at Bjärka and he takes hist last name from our teacher there, Peter Halldorf. Peter and the general monastic, ecumenical life at Bjärka opened up Christianity to me. There is more to the christian way of life than the feverish, stressed spirituality of the unwise charismatics. To actually be able to see and study the two other main traditions of Christianity, the catholic and the ortodox church, without being urged to scream in fear was a tremendous treasure to me. Halldorf led our studies with them in such a way that we kept our footing within our protestant, lutheran frame but yet we could converse with these spiritual spaces in a way that both felt safe and immensely enriching. To say it short, Halldorf and Bjärka gave me tools to construct a christian faith that wasn't only generating stress. Of course, the traumatic effects that I had endured under Påls way of seeing the world made my faith bent enough that I'm truly a weird christian in many ways. I often find myself looking as much in the spaces of the christian heretics as in the actual body of the church for nuggets of wisdom and truth, but well.. what Anton concerns that is beside the point. Anton is the one that actually carries my love for the actual church and for what she actually is. This is my home and it's a mansion with many rooms, many way of expressing the discipleship to Christ. Anton hasn't got all the answers to the frustration and fears of Pål but has gotten enough to stay put, and every time Simon Jester walks outside the mansion of Christianity proper he works intensely to bring me back to the core of the faith. 

*

Christianity is weird to me, it always will be I believe. It's a bucket of thoughts, visions and ideas that looks entirely different if you are viewing them from the outside or from the inside and it will in a sense always be a sorrow to me that not everyone are able or allowed to see it from the inside - where the beauty is so much starker than from the outside, but it's not the world we live in in the end. I am on the inside though, for better and worse, and Pål and Anton represent the two modalities I'm carrying myself with in the walls of this grand faith. 

Richard Dagson and Ludvig Martinsson 

Next up is a pair representing my reasoning mind, my analytical capabilities and this is interesting because both of them has entirely been given to me by the external world, outside of my family and my early environments. They have been taught into me. 

Richard stands for the "hard" matters of reality, the practical and physical ones and to be honest he is my inner materialist straight up. You see, when I look at the world I cannot deny that I see a world in perfect harmony with what the materialist sciences are teaching. I have never been much scientifically minded - it's not my tree to speak with the metaphor Jonathan and I used a lot back when - so I know very little of the details of the theories and models propelled by this particular field but everywhere I look I see that it just adds up, outside of anecdotes and wild stories there is no place for the supernatural in our world. Everything has an explanation and it may be that for some fringe cases there is no explanation available but either there is no way to perform a proper investigation of the case or there is tonnes of explanations available and nothing that especially makes the case invalidating the models of science in total. My analytical mind is simply materialist by default and if science had stayed at Newton I can't see that there would be any reason to go anywhere else with my thoughts. "Shut up and calculate and let all other things rest." 

However, I'm not a materialist in total. Instead Richard fights a constant uphill battle against the christian pairs and the Idealist one who will be mentioned below. They bully him most of the time, but he makes sure to shoot back now and then, he can wait because Richard trust in truth and truth will reveal the reality of his views. Hope and faith in other senses is simply not possible. 

What Richard really can't take in though is that there are realms in existence where analytical reasoning simply doesn't come into play and where materialism if not falls apart simply becomes limiting and near meaningless. Richard doesn't really care, he just waits for data even when those realms are in focus of existence, but that's why his way of seeing the world so rarely is in the front seat of Simon Jester. He is a voice I'm hearing and sometimes consult, but mostly I ignore him because I as Simon Jester simply doesn't want him to be right. I want the realms which hold the power to cancel this one, and in times where I can't see them my heart is always on the search for them. Richard be damned. 

*

Ludvigs department is regarding all the soft and "liberal" sciences - my tree to speak with Jonathan-terms - and I'm not ashamed to say in the end that this way of reason I learnt with the libertarians and Ludvigs names are from that era. It's not all too much to say here other than that it perplexes me when libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism sometimes get called illogical and dumb-witted because in my experience it is everything but. To the contrary these ideologies, these models of the human world of interactions is based in reason as much as humanly possible and a way to be libertarian is to cast away all feelings and "should bes" of your opinion cabinet to just look at the grit of how the world and humanity actually functions. This doesn't mean the conclusions of libertarians always is correct, all of that bunch is still human with all it may entail, but to see the world as Ludvig does teaches you in a pattern of thinking I just thoroughly enjoy and frankly see as healthy. Utilitarist thinking puts one at risk for all kinds of mental pitfalls and the reasoning pattern of Ludvig may be at fault for other reasons but it isn't as simpletonicly stupid as many other ways of seeing the world may be. I'm a libertarian, Ludvig is the libertarian within me. 

Mats Mild and Karl Vaccharino

This is a pair that may actually be a bit too low down on the list than what they should be in terms of what is primal in me, because this pair represent my masculinity. Not in terms of sexuality and such, because that is August and Octobers department but rather how the masculine vein in me expresses itself in other means. 

Mats is a sports guy, not a jock exactly because the disability affected me in such a way that I became a sports nerd rather than a practitioner myself. In any case my younger years directed my into, frankly, an obsession with sports. Mainly soccer and ice hockey but in younger years all kinds of stuff. Combined with a general ability to be "good" at obsessing at stuff my interest in sports (now perhaps only soccer) is simply massive. The environment that brought me into the interest is now gone so it sits a bit oddly with me actually, I have almost no one to properly share it with but at the same time I progressively becomes better at enjoying things just by myself and for my own sake so it's not really an issue. when it comes to masculinity I realize that I relate to the masculine world a bit from the outside, I'm looking in at what "real men" are doing without being capable of trying out my own guns myself. I have very few typical male interest, but sports is at least one that has allowed itself to be huge..

Karl is the head of the department of games. All kind of games really but as it is now we're really talking about board games. Karl is insanely competitive, in a way that rather bothers me because I wish I could enjoy games in a more chill way but in Karls mind the game becomes as grand as the world once he has fully immersed himself in them.  I have noticed that I set something of a value system in motion when I enter into this mode - I am being defined, judged and valued by the game in question and it becomes extremely important to me to come out on the good side. I don't care so much about winning, anymore, than not doing bad. I hate the feeling of being bad, wrong, poor, whatever and in abstract, silly games this fear becomes understated more than anything else. Annoying, but the love of games is still there. Karl is also a strong carrier of my nerd tendencies and when he works with Mats they create the environment suitable to make The Hobby to be what it is. I can't really speak about the Hobby in public, but I have no doubt these two are the engineers behind its evolution. 

Hjalmar Hellström and Valdemar Klintenberg

These two are my creative muses, Hjalmar governs my writings and perhaps especially my poetry and Valdemar deals with my love for the theater in its various forms. Hjalmar has been with me since late 2003 and finding him made my mind adult in a very specific, concrete fashion as of how I remember my life, and he will likely always play a big part of my personal expression in this world. At one time I stated to someone that thousands of things may change about me but I will always write, and I'll likely always write my poetry. The poetry is the only craft I know reasonably well in this world, I'm not the strongest poet out there and I won't likely ever be read at any notable scale but I know what I've seen in my "hymns" and I know the power and glory that can be found there. Maybe they only are meant for me and those rather close to me, maybe something grander will happen with it in the future, I don't really care to be as honest as I might. Hjalmar is still one of the greater forces and one of my closer friends of my inner life.  

My interest for the theater is actually more of a specific era of my young adulthood, not much of it remains today but Valdemar - the name of our rather quirky improv group at the time - is still very dear to me. He quite much represents a will within me to take to the stage and show the world the strange and wild vibrations that I can feel within me and that I can wish would be allowed to come out and affect the world in some direction. But, alas, I'm all too much of a buffoon for that to ever happen in the way I envision within me. The theater world was too harsh, too narrow for me to make any headway in and my acting skills in one way or another just too poor. But to try to explore that world was still extremely fun and rewarding and I suspect Valdemar still have a day or two at the wheels of Jester. We'll see.  


Bernhard Watts and Joel McKenna

So the last pair and perhaps the easiest surnames to recognize for the general public. This pair represents my idealist journey and gosh, I must have chronicled the twists of turns of what' has been going on there enough to not repeat too much of the content of Idealism here. Let me say just this though, Bernhard is not about analytical reasoning as such. I haven't thought my way to being an idealist. The character of Bernhard is named that way due to Bernardo Kastrup however and as he said, his system of Analytical Idealism is to function as a way around the reasoning "bouncer of the heart" as is the every day intellect. With his model I have a way to wrestle down Richards more direct and easy form of reasoning, but it doesn't make my Bernhard into a reasoning figure as such. Instead Idealism is a way of seeing the world where all of its modes and faculties have been considered. In fact, I consider materialism and idealism to be near identical in essence but different in functionality and since I'm more incline to bark at trees where materialism have no or little usage it is Bernhard that is allowed to be in the driving seat of Simon Jester more than any of the other as it is today. He's by far the most complex figure and the one that can transcend most layers within me. Who he is in detail you have to consult other texts to know though. 

Joel represent my love, my passion for mysticism and spiritual experiences. He carries the surname of Terence Mckenna because it's from him primarily that I received a verbal model of what is going on in the world of psychedelics. It's via these substances I can say to Richard too that mysticism and mystical practices can never be a waste of time - even if they are rationally absurd to a high extent - because it is real, it's a concrete realm and segment of existence - if you're doubting and don't have the faith to pray effectively then eat some mushrooms and bring yourself to a dark room and a few hours later you will understand what Joel is all about. That realm, that layer of existence is Joels all focus. 

He is more calm at this stage of my life than what he has been before because of how severly burnt I've been by Lucy, but he is still alive and just in the latest few days I have gotten a way to reactivate his abilities in a safe and blessed fashion within the walls of my own Church none the less. Neither Joel nor I in general knows where the end of the mystical road really lies and have only a quite vague idea on where it is going on the short run, but I pray with almost all my being that we'll find tools and spaces to get to walk on it as much as possible in the near future. Existence is mystical, the mystical path is the only way forward in many ways. I agree with Joel on that. 

***

There we have them. They are a rather strange bunch and I won't elaborate further on how I interact with them in practice and what element of realness those interaction entals, but I'm thankful for them. Simon Jester is such a weird figure, he is a little bit less weird when remembering that he is only the head master of a department of twelve (at least) beings masquerading as a cohesive person...



















  



 











 

 
 





























 

Oscar October - Mörk kropp
August May - Ljus kropp
Paul Ekman - Låg kristendom
Anton Halldorf - Hög kristendom
Mats Mild - Manlighet, sport
Karl Vaccharino - Tävling, brädspel
Richard  Dagson- Materialisten 
Ludvig Martinsson - Anarkisten
Hjalmar Hellström - Skrivande
Valdemar Klintenberg- Skådespel
Joel Huxley - Mystikern, psykonauten
Bernhard Watts - Idealisten